PP02 - Status Report Presentation

Each project team will prepare and deliver a final presentation that introduces the project on which they are working, describes some of the project contributions on which they have been working, and reflects on their process, progress and learning experiences thus far.

Assignment

Presentation Content

The presentation should strive to tell a cohesive, interesting and engaging story. In doing so it should include the following content:

• Introduce the project on which the team is working.
  • The team should ask itself the following questions about the introduction:
    1. Is the introduction is sufficient to give someone who has never heard of the project a clear picture of what the project is, why people care about it, what it does from the user’s perspective, and where and how it is used?
    2. Does the introduction provide sufficient context for the audience to understand the contributions that the team will be presenting (see next bullet point)?
• Present some of the contributions that the team has been working on.
  • For each contribution that is discussed the team should ask itself:
    1. Given the introduction provided, will the audience understand the problem (bug fix, featured, etc.) that the contribution addresses, why it is important, and the effect that it has (or will have) on the project?
    2. Will the audience get a clear conceptual picture of the approach that team used (or is using) to address the problem?
    3. Will the audience follow the technical details presented (e.g. diagrams, implementation, tests, etc) and understand how they implement (or partially implement) the team’s conceptual approach to addressing the problem?
• Reflect on your team’s experience thus far with the project contributions.
  • The team’s reflections should answer the following questions:
    1. What significant successes and challenges did the team experience and what factors contributed to them?
    2. What generalizable lessons has the team learned that they can apply going forward in this project and beyond?
• Briefly describe the team’s plans for its future work on the project.

Presentation Criteria

The presentation and presenters should aim to meet the following criteria:

• Timing: Meet the target length for the presentation within plus or minus 2 minutes. The target time for your presentation will be set as follows:
  • Teams of 2-4 members will have 20 minutes.
  • Teams of 5-6 members will have 25 minutes.
  • There will be an additional 5-10 minutes of question and answer time following the presentation.
• Balance: All team members should present for approximately equal amounts of time.
  • Every team member must participate in the presentation of at least one of the team’s contributions.
• Audience: Prepare this presentation for an audience of your peers (advanced undergraduate computer science majors).
  • You may assume that the audience knows a good bit about computer science and free and open source software. However, you should not assume that they know anything about the specific project your team is working on, or the frameworks and languages in which you are working.
  • When discussing topics that are outside of the audience’s assumed knowledge, context and background sufficient for the audience to follow the presentation must be provided.
• Presentation Materials: The presentation materials should:
  • Use clear and engaging visual materials (slides, videos and/or whiteboard).
  • Employ large fonts, images and diagrams that are very easy for the audience to read, even from the back of the room.
  • Limit the amount of content on each slide so that the audience can absorb it and listen to what is being said.
• Presenters: Individual presenters should:
  • Provide visual cues (e.g. a pointer or highlighting) to clearly indicate which parts of the slide/visual/code are being discussed at each point to assist the audience in following along.
  • Present material in an order and at a pace that allows the audience to follow along.
  • Speak using a clear, audible, engaging, and fluent voice.
  • Deliver content without reading verbatim from notes or slides (it is a good idea to use notes and slides — just don’t read from them word for word).
  • Demonstrate understanding of technical details and the ability to explain these details to the audience.
  • Convince the audience that substantial effort has been invested in the project, equivalent to the expected time investment per week.

Acknowledgements

This assignment builds from and adapts ideas and content from the following activities created by others:

• This version incorporates some elements from a similar assignment used by John MacCormick in 2023.

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All textual materials used in this course are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License

All executable code used in this course is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3 or later